Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description in this section is not prior art to the claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Various techniques has been used to ensure an appropriate sharing of information such as a document with users as participants who have attended a meeting or with users within a group for a project implementation.
For example, there is provided a technique that captures a business card of the user to whom a different access right is desired to be granted together with an identification code (QR code (registered trademark)) of an image desired to be set the access right on and grants different access privileges to the user identified by the business card corresponding to an arrangement position within the captured image.
Another technique employs the QR code for easily distributing electronic data to a large count of unspecified audience in a lecture hall without advance preparation. The electronic data desired to be distributed is encoded as the QR code to be projected on a screen with a projector. The audience captures the QR code with a device such as a camera-equipped mobile phone. The captured QR code is decoded into the electronic data.
Yet another technique enables secure interconnection and resource sharing between devices belong to predetermined groups. For the interconnection and the resource sharing, for example, an administrator creates and prints the QR code to distribute the printed QR code to the students. The QR code contains the information of a student ID number, a password, and an address of a group management server.
The student who has received the QR code, scans the QR code with his or her mobile phone (cellular mobile station) and connects to the group management server based on the address contained in the QR code. After connection to the group management server, the mobile phone acquires a pair of public key and private key, and a digital certificate for a personal computer (PC) or a device which the student uses, and transmits them to the PC with short-range wireless communication.